Computers the cartographers of the future with student's PhD research

The sepia-tinged image of a cartographer hunched over a dusty desk, meticulously mapping by hand and ink the far corners of the globe, may soon fade into history.

Tasmanian PhD candidate Willem Olding, who won a $7,500 Hydro Tasmania scholarship to develop his work, has been working on a way to turn previously-collected data into maps in a more efficient manner.

He said the maps were an important resource for land monitoring.

"We have what are called 'ground-truth maps', which are made by humans looking at satellite images and people going out in the field and actually looking at things," he said.

"But we want to make algorithms that actually learn from what these people have done and can generate maps automatically in the future without any assistance."

The ancient art of map-making could be made obsolete.

"Generating maps by hand takes years and millions of dollars," Mr Olding said.

"By the time you have generated the map whatever you have mapped has probably changed or it out of date.

"By doing it automatically we can generate the maps quickly and they will provide an accurate reflection of what is on the ground for environmental modelling and monitoring of deforestation and water usage and important things like that."

Hydro Tasmania's chief executive officer Steve Davy said the algorithms will saved time and money.

"Hopefully the kind of the research that he is doing will lead to maps being produced much more quickly from field observations," he said.